Topics Ethics

Question Is there a moral difference between wishing for a selfish outcome (e.g. someone's death) - and acting on that wish (murder).

Accepted:
March 2, 2006

Comments

In some ways of thinking, there is no significant moral difference between the two cases. For example, have a look at the gospel of Matthew 5:28 ("But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.") I gather that what this means is: One who experiences lust for someone not his wife is already guilty of the sin of adultery.

But I must say, this seems like a pretty goofy idea to me. For one thing, if the mere wish made me already guilty in every morally relevant way, it is hard to see why acting on that wish would make matters worse...but of course, it obviously does.

Depending upon how one assesses moral value, the mere wish (not enacted) might have no negative value at all. For example, if we count moral value in a consequentialist way--that is, by determining whether the consequences of something are (predictably or actually) beneficial, then a non-enacted wish, having no (notable) consequences, is morally neutral. The same might be true in other moral systems, in which it is actions only that have value--and motives or mental states only insofar as they produce (or are dispositions to produce) morally significant actions.

Now virtue theorists (as I am) would say that there is something wrong with wishing an evil, and something at least partly right about resisting such a wish--refusing to enact it. But to be a better person, on would have to undergo the kind of habituation and socialization that would lead them not to have such wishes--or it that is not humanly possible, to have as few such wishes as humanly possible, and to have those that do occur seem as faint and as weak as is humanly possible.

But in any sensible moral theory, at any rate, it seems to me that merely wishing an evil cannot count as equally bad--or as the same bad--as actually performing that evil.

Question Is there a moral difference between wishing for a selfish outcome (e.g. someone's death) - and acting on that wish (murder). Accepted:March 2, 2006

Question Is there a moral difference between wishing for a selfish outcome (e.g. someone's death) - and acting on that wish (murder).

Accepted:
March 2, 2006